UP-STAIRS.
The two Ingraham girls had been sitting in their own room over the
shop when the accident occurred, and it was there they now took
Sylvie Argenter, to have her dress tacked together again, and to
wash her face and hands and settle her hair and hat. Mrs. Ingraham
came bustling after with "arnicky" for the bruised arm. They were
all very delighted and important, having the great Mr. Argenter's
daughter quite to themselves in the intimacy of "up-stairs," to wait
upon and take care of. Mrs. Ingraham fussed and "my-deared" a good
deal; her daughters took it with more outward calmness. Although
baker's daughters, they belonged to the present youthful generation,
born to best education at the public schools, sewing-machines, and
universal double-skirted full-fashions; and had read novels of
society out of the Roxeter town library.
There was a good deal of time after the bathing and mending and
re-arranging were all done. The axle of the phæton had been split,
and must be temporarily patched up and banded. There was nothing for
Sylvie to do but to sit quietly there in the old-fashioned,
dimity-covered easy-chair which they gave her by the front window,
and wait. Meanwhile, she observed and wondered much.
She had never got out of the Argenter and Highford atmosphere
before. She didn't know--as we don't about the moon--whether there
might _be_ atmosphere for the lesser and subsidiary world. But here
she found herself in the bedroom of two girls who lived over a
bake-shop, and, really, it seemed they actually _did_ live, much
after the fashion of other people. There were towels on the stand, a
worked pincushion on the toilet, white shades and red tassels to the
windows, this comfortable easy-chair beside one and a low splint
rocker in the other,--with queer, antique-looking soft footstools of
dark cloth, tamboured in bright colors before each,--white quilted
covers on table and bureau, and positively, a striped, knitted
foot-spread in scarlet and white yarn, folded across the lower end
of the bed.
She had never thought of there being anything at Ingraham's Corner
but a shop on a dusty street, with, she supposed,--only she never
really supposed about it,--some sort of places, behind and above it,
under the same roof, for the people to get away into when they
weren't selling bread, to cook, and eat, and sleep, she had never
exactly imagined how, but of course not as they did in real houses
that were not shops. And when Mrs. Ingraham, who had bustled off
down-stairs, came shuffling up again as well as she could with both
hands full and her petticoats in her way, and appeared bearing a cup
of hot tea and a plate of spiced gingerbread,--the latter _not_ out
of the shop, but home-made, and out of her own best parlor
cupboard,--she perceived almost with bewilderment, that cup and
plate were of spotless china, and the spoon was of real, worn,
bright silver. She might absolutely put these things to her own lips
without distaste or harm.
"It'll do you good after your start," said kindly Mrs. Ingraham.
The difference came in with the phraseology. A silver spoon is a
silver spoon, but speech cannot be rubbed up for occasion. Sylvie
thought she must mean _before_ her start, about which she was
growing anxious.
"O, I'm sorry you should have taken so much trouble," she exclaimed.
"I wonder if the phæton will be ready soon?"
"Mr. Ingraham he's got back," replied the lady. "He says Rylocks'll
be through with it in about half an hour. Don't you be a mite
concerned. Jest set here and drink your tea, and rest. Dot, I guess
you'd as good's come down-stairs. I shall be wantin' you with them
fly nets. Your father's fetched home the frames."
Ray Ingraham sat in the side window, and crocheted thread
edging,--of which she had already yards rolled up and pinned
together in a white ball upon her lap,--while Sylvie sipped her tea.
The side window looked out into a shady little garden-spot, in the
front corner of which grew a grand old elm, which reached around
with beneficent, beautiful branches, and screened also a part of the
street aspect. Seen from within, and from under these great, green,
swaying limbs,--the same here in the village as out in free field or
forest,--the street itself seemed less dusty, less common, less
impossible to pause upon for anything but to buy bread, or mend a
wheel, or get a horse shod.
"How different it is, in behind!" said Sylvie, speaking out
involuntarily.
Ray shot a quick look at her from her bright dark eyes.
"I suppose it is,--almost everywheres," she answered. "I've got
turned round so, sometimes, with people and places, until they never
seemed the same again."
If Ray had not said "everywheres," Sylvie would not have been
reminded; but that word sent her, in recollection, out to the
house-front and the shop-sign again. Ray knew better; she was a
good scholar, but she heard her mother and others like her talk
vernacular every day. It was a wonder she shaded off from it as
delicately as she did.
Ray Ingraham, or Rachel,--for that was her name, and her sister's
was Dorothy, though these had been shortened into two as charming,
pet little appellatives as could have been devised by the most
elegant intention,--was a pretty girl, with her long-lashed,
quick-glancing dark eyes, her hair, that crimped naturally and fell
off in a deep, soft shadow from her temples, her little mouth,
neatly dimpled in, and the gypsy glow of her clear, bright skin. Dot
was different: she was dark too, not _so_ dark; her eyes were full,
brilliant gray, with thick, short lashes; she was round and
comfortable: nose, cheeks, chin, neck, waist, hands; her mouth was
large, with white teeth that showed easily and broadly, instead of,
like Ray's, with just a quiver and a glimmer. She was like her
mother. She looked the smart, buxom, common-sense village girl to
perfection. Ray had the hint of something higher and more delicate
about her, though she had the trigness, and readiness, and
every-day-ness too.
Sylvie sat silent after this, and looked at her, wondering, more
than she had wondered about the furniture. Thinking, "how many girls
there were in the world! All sorts--everywhere! What did they all
do, and find to care for?" These were not the "other" girls of whom
her mother had blandly said that she could show kindnesses by taking
them to drive. Those were such as Aggie Townsend, the navy captain's
widow's daughter,--nice, but poor; girls whom everybody noticed, of
course, but who hadn't it in their power to notice anybody. That
made such a difference! These were _otherer_ yet! And for all that
they were girls,--girls! Ever so much of young life, and glow, and
companionship, ever so much of dream, and hope, and possible story,
is in just that little plural of five letters. A company of girls!
Heaven only knows what there is _not_ represented, and suggested,
and foreshadowed there!
Sylvie Argenter, with all her nonsense, had a way of putting
herself, imaginatively, into other people's places. She used to tell
her mother, when she was a little child and said her hymns,--which
Mrs. Argenter, not having any very fresh, instant spiritual life, I
am afraid, out of which to feed her child, chose for her in dim
remembrance of what had been thought good for herself when she was
little,--that she "didn't know exactly as she _did_ 'thank the
goodness and the grace that on her birth had smiled.'" She "should
like pretty well to have been a little--Lapland girl with a sledge;
or--a Chinese; or--a kitchen girl; a little while, I mean!"
She had a way of intimacy with the servants which Mrs. Argenter
found it hard to check. She liked to get into Jane's room when she
was "doing herself up" of an afternoon, and look over her cheap
little treasures in her band-box and chest-drawer. She made especial
love to a carnelian heart, and a twisted gold ring with two clasped
hands on it.
"I think it's real nice to have only _two_ or _three_ things, and to
'clean yourself up,' and to have a 'Sunday out!'" she said.
Mrs. Argenter was anxiously alarmed at the child's low tastes. Yet
these were very practicably compatible with the alternations of
importance in being driven about in her father's barouche, taking
Aggie Townsend up on the road, and "setting her down at the small
gray house."
Sylvie thought, this afternoon, looking at Ray Ingraham, in her
striped lilac and white calico, with its plaited waist and
cross-banded, machine-stitched double skirt, sitting by her shady
window, beyond which, behind the garden angle, rose up the red brick
wall of the bakehouse, whence came a warm, sweet smell of many
new-drawn loaves,--looking around within, at the snug tidiness of
the simple room, and even out at the street close by, with its stir
and curious interest, yet seen from just as real a shelter as she
had in her own chamber at home,--that it might really be nice to be
a baker's daughter and live in the village,--"when it wasn't your
own fault, and you couldn't help it."
Ray nodded to some one out of her window.
Sylvie saw a bright color come up in her cheeks, and a sparkle into
her eyes as she did so, while a little smile, that she seemed to
think was all to herself, crept about her mouth and lingered at the
dimpled corners. There was an expression as if she hid herself quite
away in some consciousness of her own, from any recollection of the
strange girl sitting by.
The strange girl glanced from _her_ window, and saw a young
carpenter with his box of tools go past under the elm, with some
sort of light subsiding also in like manner from his face. He was in
his shirt sleeves,--but the sleeves were white,--and his straw hat
was pushed back from his forehead, about which brown curls lay damp
with heat. Sylvie did not believe he had even touched his hat, when
he had looked up through the friendly elm boughs and bowed to the
village girl in her shady corner. His hands were full, of course.
Such people's hands were almost always full. That was the reason
they did not learn such things. But how cute it had been of Ray
Ingraham _not_ to sit in the front window! He was certain to come
by, too, she supposed. To be sure; that was the street. Ray Ingraham
would not have cared to live up a long avenue, to wait for people to
come on purpose, in carriages.
She got as far as this in her thinkings, at the same moment that she
came to the bottom of her cup of tea. And then she caught a glimpse
of Rylocks, rolling the phæton across from the smithy.
"What a funny time I have had! And how kind you have all been!" she
said, getting up. "I am ever so much obliged, Miss Ingraham. I
wonder"--and then, suddenly, she thought it might not be quite civil
to wonder.
Ray Ingraham laughed.
"So do I!" she said quickly, with a bright look. She knew well
enough what Sylvie stopped at.
Each of these two girls wondered if there would ever be any more
"getting in behind" for them, as regarded each other, in their two
different lives.
As Sylvie Argenter came out at the shop-door, Rodney Sherrett
appeared at the same point, safely mounted on the runaway Duke. The
team had been stopped below at the river; he had found a stable and
a saddle, had left Red Squirrel and the broken vehicle to be sent
for, and was going home, much relieved and assured by being able to
present himself upon his father's favorite roadster, whole in bones
and with ungrazed skin.
The street boys stood round again, as he dismounted to make fresh
certainty of Sylvie's welfare, handed her into her phæton, and then,
springing to the saddle, rode away beside her, down the East Dorbury
road.
Mrs. Argenter was sitting with her worsted work in the high,
many-columned terrace piazza which gave grandeur to the great
show-house that Mr. Argenter had built some five years since, when
Sylvie, with Rod Sherrett beside her, came driving up the long
avenue, or, as Mrs. Argenter liked to call it, out of the English
novels, the _approach_. She laid back her canvas and wools into the
graceful Fayal basket-stand, and came down the first flight of stone
steps to meet them.
"How late you are, Sylvie! I had begun to be quite worried," she
said, when Sylvie dropped the reins around the dasher and stood up
in the low carriage, nodding at her mother. She felt quite brave and
confident about the accident, now that Rodney Sherrett had come all
the way with her to the very door, to account for it and to help her
out with the story.
Rodney lifted his hat to the lady.
"We've had a great spill, Mrs. Argenter. All my fault, and Red
Squirrel's. Miss Argenter has brought home more than I have from the
_mêlée_. I started with a tandem, and here I am with only Gray Duke
and a borrowed saddle. It was out at Ingraham's Corner,--a quick
turn, you know,--and Miss Argenter had just stopped when Squirrel
sprang round upon her. My trap is pretty much into kindlings, but
there are no bones broken. You must let me send Rodgers round on his
way to town to-morrow, to take the phæton to the builder's. It wants
a new axle. I'm awful sorry; but after all"--with a bright
smile,--"I can't think it altogether an ill wind,--for _me_, at any
rate. I couldn't help enjoying the ride home."
"I don't believe you could help enjoying the whole of it, except
the very minute of the tip-out itself, before you knew," said
Sylvie, laughing.
"Well, it _was_ a lark; but the worst is coming. I've got to go home
all alone. I wish you'd come and tell the tale for _me_, Miss
Sylvie. I shouldn't be half so afraid!"